Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “No, it’s impossible. It’s impossible to tell anyone what it feels like to be you. It’s impossible. We live the same way that we dream – alone.”

— Joseph Conrad

452. “Cried out to us, “Debark, here is the entrance.” More than a thousand at the gates I saw Out of the Heavens rained down, who angrily Were saying, “Who is this that without death Goes through the kingdom of the people dead?”

— Joseph Conrad

453. “Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship.”

— Joseph Conrad

454. “If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,” he said.”

— Joseph Conrad

455. “Give them all of my dear love and a kiss. Tell them I think of them by day, pray for them by night, and find my best comfort in their affection at all times.”

— Joseph Conrad

456. “My dear aunt’s endeavours to ‘nurse up my strength’ seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”

— Joseph Conrad

457. “Our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty. It does not punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if to gratify a secret, unappeasable spite. One would think that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come nearest to rising above the trammels of earthly caution; for it is only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just palpable enough to give one a fright – an extra-terrestrial touch.”

— Joseph Conrad

458. “I descended the poop.”

— Joseph Conrad

459. “Then the earth for you is only a standing place – and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say.”

— Joseph Conrad

460. “Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship;.”

— Joseph Conrad

461. “Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf – then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as well.”

— Joseph Conrad

462. “Anarchists, I suppose, have no families – not, at any rate, as we understand that social relation. Organization into families may answer to a need of human nature, but in the last instance it is based on law, and therefore must be something odious and impossible to an anarchist.”

— Joseph Conrad

463. “He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad

464. “The cruel futility of things stood unveiled in the levity and sufferings of that incorrigible people; the cruel futility of lives and of deaths thrown away in the vain endeavor to attain an enduring solution of the problem.”

— Joseph Conrad

465. “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

— Joseph Conrad

466. “He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship; and so is their country – the sea.”

— Joseph Conrad

467. “He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “’The horror! The horror!”

— Joseph Conrad

468. “I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.”

— Joseph Conrad

469. “You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my – ’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him – but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”

— Joseph Conrad

470. “I didn’t know what he was playing up to – if he was playing up to anything at all – and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad

471. “He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to part from the serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his thoughts.”

— Joseph Conrad

472. “To the unblushing womankind of Florence To go about displaying breast and paps.”

— Joseph Conrad

473. “A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes’ neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet ankles. The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.”

— Joseph Conrad

474. “It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.”

— Joseph Conrad

475. “O Virgins sacrosanct! if ever hunger, Vigils, or cold for you I have endured, The occasion spurs me their reward to claim!”

— Joseph Conrad

476. “This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh.”

— Joseph Conrad

477. “The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar.”

— Joseph Conrad

478. “He was a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.”

— Joseph Conrad

479. “The truth travels over the earth secretly; it seeks a nest among the people. To the authorities it’s like a knife in the fire. They cannot accept it. It will cut them and burn them. Truth is your good friend and a sworn enemy of the authorities – that’s why it hides itself.”

— Joseph Conrad

480. “It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil.”

— Joseph Conrad

481. “A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.”

— Joseph Conrad

482. “While there’s life there is hope, truly; but there is fear, too.”

— Joseph Conrad

483. “Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well, – the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.”

— Joseph Conrad

484. “But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.”

— Joseph Conrad

485. “No, no es modestia exactamente. No estoy nada seguro de ser modesto;.”

— Joseph Conrad

486. “Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”

— Joseph Conrad

487. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage.”

— Joseph Conrad

488. “I’ve seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men – men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther.”

— Joseph Conrad

489. “My bones were buried by Octavian. I am Virgilius; and for no crime else Did I lose heaven, than for not having faith;.”

— Joseph Conrad

490. “The Emperor proposes to give all commanders of divisions the right to shoot marauders, but I much fear this will oblige one half the army to shoot the other.”

— Joseph Conrad

491. “But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”

— Joseph Conrad

492. “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.”

— Joseph Conrad

493. “We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face:.”

— Joseph Conrad

494. “Stein lifted his hand. “And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?” He shook his head regretfully. “It seems to me that some would have been very fine – if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don’t know.”

— Joseph Conrad

495. “The affair of the brig Bonito was bound to cause a sensation in Makassar, the prettiest, and perhaps the cleanest-looking of all the towns in the Islands; which however knows few occasions for excitement.”

— Joseph Conrad

496. “I was made to look at the convention that lurks in all truth and on the essential sincerity of falsehood.”

— Joseph Conrad

497. “What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”

— Joseph Conrad

498. “For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”

— Joseph Conrad

499. “He sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping.”

— Joseph Conrad

500. “When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect.”

— Joseph Conrad